Build 2017 announcements that effect your work

A couple of minutes ago the keynote of Build 2017 ended. The keynote contained a lot of announcements that I was not expecting.

IoT Edge

Microsoft announced Azure IoT Edge, which is technology that's meant to extend devices. It's a cross-platform runtime that runs on both Windows and Linux, and it will work on devices that are smaller than a Raspberry Pi. Devices would normally send telemetry data to an IoT hub, and analytics would be sent back to the device. Now, all of this can be handled by Azure. Logic for these devices can be developed and tested in the cloud, and then it can be packaged into a Docker container and exported to the machine itself.

This technology certainly will effect the way you will handle information from and to you devices within an IoT scenario.

Visual Studio 2017

Main announcements for Visual Studio 2017 were:

• VS2017 support for Azure Functions and Logic Apps
• Azure Application insights for Azure Functions

The support for Azure Functions within VS2017 and Application Insights will make it a lot easier to integrate it within a Continuous Delivery Pipeline and watch your serverless applications.

Azure

A lot of the time during the keynote was used to talk about Azure, what is totally logical as the mission of Microsoft still is Cloud and Mobile first. The new things for Azure were:

• Azure Cloud Shell: Bash shell within the Azure Portal, PowerShell will follow soon.
• Azure Mobile Application for IOS and Android
• Visual Studio Snapshot debugging for Azure (demo was from within the Application map within Azure Application Insights)
• Visual Studio for the MAC
• Azure Database Migration Service: Service for the migration of existing on premise databases (also Oracle) to Azure SQL Server.
• PostgreSQL as a Service
• MySQL as a Service

Azure Cosmos DB

The Azure Cosmos DB is a new service that is a globally distributed database service that is multi model and multi Api. Some keys fact about this service are:

• Globally Distributes: Locations can be altered from the Azure Portal
• Multi model
  • Key-Value
  • Document
  • Column Family
  • Graph
• Multi API
  • DocumentDB
  • MongoDB
  • Table Storage
  • Gremlin Graph
  • Spark
• Scale to any need
• Comprehensive SLA

Cognitive Services

Microsoft is getting better the last years with Artificial Intelligence and services to support this like the cognitive services. For the cognitive services there were some announcements regarding new Api’s. The most important one was the possibility for custom solutions. With custom solutions you can think of learning software for image recognition for example called the Custom Vision Service. The demonstration that was given during the keynote was about the recognition of leaf types.

 

All of these announcements will affect our work and how we will do our work and certainly how we design our solutions.